[Quote No.35888] Need Area: Mind > General "[Humanity is born free. Mankind has free will.] Man is not, like the animals, an obsequious puppet of instincts and sensual impulses. Man has the power to suppress instinctive desires, he has a will of his own, he chooses between incompatible ends... While all other animals are unconditionally driven by the impulse to preserve their own lives and by the impulse of proliferation, man has the power to master even these impulses. He can control both his sexual desires and his will to live. He can give up his life when the conditions under which alone he could preserve it seem intolerable. Man is capable of dying for a cause or of committing suicide. To live is for man the outcome of a choice, of a judgment of value." - Ludwig von Mises[1881 – 1973], an Austrian-American economist, historian, philosopher, author, and classical liberal who had a significant influence on the modern free-market libertarian movement and the Austrian School of economics. Author's Info on Wikipedia - Author on ebay - Author on Amazon - More Quotes by this AuthorStart Searching Amazon for GiftsSend as Free eCard with optional Google Image

[Quote No.36185] Need Area: Mind > General "Because the brain’s wiring is so densely packed, building a connectome [a comprehensive map of neural connections in the brain] stands as one of the most formidable data collection efforts ever concocted. About one petabyte of computer memory will be needed to store the images needed to form a picture of a one-millimeter cube of mouse brain, the scientists say. By comparison, it takes Facebook about one petabyte of data storage space to hold 40 billion photos." - Ashlee VanceScience journalist. Published in The New York Times, 'In Pursuit of a Mind Map, Slice by Slice'. 27 Dec 2010.Author's Info on Wikipedia - Author on ebay - Author on Amazon - More Quotes by this AuthorStart Searching Amazon for GiftsSend as Free eCard with optional Google Image

[Quote No.38791] Need Area: Mind > General "[Humans have developed remarkable machines that have extended human capacity in the past, including increasing our strength, speed, stamina and mathematical/computational and sensory storage abilities. In the future the machines we create will exceed even our current dreams. The internet allowed improved communication and storage of enormous amounts of information, then search algorithms/engines allowed us to find key words ranked by popularity and usefulness and now a computer called Watson offers the potential to answer word based questions mechanically. The following article looks at this latest development. Despite this incredible technological breakthrough, each individual and society as a whole should never forget that the individual human brain is still the most miraculous 'machine' that we will ever possess and that our skill in using it well will be the primary determinant of our personal fulfilment and contribution to society.] 'IBM Developing Computing System to Challenge Humans on America’s Favorite Quiz Show, Jeopardy!' -
To successfully compete on 'Jeopardy!' Watson had to analyze each question to determine exactly what was being asked, analyze the available content to extract precise answers, and quickly compute its level of confidence in the answer based on supporting and refuting information found.
In its process of analyzing a question and determining the best answer, Watson applies advanced natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation and reasoning, and machine-learning technologies to open-domain question answering. At its core, Watson is built on IBM DeepQA technology for hypothesis generation, massive evidence gathering, analysis and scoring. It has been loaded with millions of documents, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, taxonomies, religious texts, novels, plays and other reference material that it can use to build its knowledge.
Unlike search engines, which can understand basic questions and return answers in the form of a list of relevant documents, Watson can understand questions posed in natural language and returns precise answers that directly answer the question. Rather than relying on a single algorithm, Watson uses hundreds of algorithms to find candidate answers, score those answers, gather additional supporting evidence for each candidate answer, and deeply evaluate that evidence using complex natural language processing. The more algorithms that independently arrive at the same answer, the higher the confidence level. Watson weighs all of the evidence for each candidate answer to identify the best answer and determine a confidence for that answer. If the confidence level is high enough, Watson buzzes in and answers the question.
The Watson technology has the potential to evolve for commercial use, transforming a number of industries. For example, in healthcare, it could be deployed as an online tool to assist medical professionals in formulating a diagnosis. A doctor could input a set of symptoms and medical history and receive a possible diagnosis to help the doctor arrive at a final diagnosis and treatment plan. Retailers could employ the technology to help shoppers find the exact item they are looking for. For travelers, it could help map out the most viable vacation options or transportation routes.
'The challenge is to build a system that, unlike systems before it, can rival the human mind’s ability to determine precise answers to natural language questions and to compute accurate confidences in the answers. This confidence processing ability is key. It greatly distinguishes the IBM approach from conventional search and is critical to implementing useful business applications of Question Answering.'" - Dr. David FerrucciPrincipal investigator, DeepQA/Watson project. Quote from 'IBM Developing Computing System to Challenge Humans on America’s Favorite Quiz Show, Jeopardy!' April 27, 2009. [http://www.ibm.com/ibm100/us/en/icons/watson/breakthroughs/] [Also refer to IBM's dedicated website about Watson http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/ ]Author's Info on Wikipedia - Author on ebay - Author on Amazon - More Quotes by this AuthorStart Searching Amazon for GiftsSend as Free eCard with optional Google Image

[Quote No.40894] Need Area: Mind > General "[The belief in their ability to freely chose and control their lives and the life-skills to do that are necessary for happy, confident, productive lives. When that is not the case people can become ineffective, depressed and mentally ill. Sometimes they believe they cannot even when they can. This is called learned helplessness.] Learned helplessness, as a technical term in animal psychology and related human psychology, means a condition of a human person or an animal in which it has learned to behave helplessly, even when the opportunity is restored for it to help itself by avoiding an unpleasant or harmful circumstance to which it has been subjected. Learned helplessness theory is the view that clinical depression and related mental illnesses may result from a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation. [Learned helplessness has also been considered a contributing factor in problems with academic achievement, disempowerment, self-esteem, aging, suicide, poverty, business failure, crime, domestic violence, poor parenting, discrimination, (non-meritocracy:) crony capitalism and political statism – voters calling for big paternal government interference in free markets, pessimism, hopelessness, drug abuse and alcoholism.]... In the learned helplessness experiment an animal is repeatedly hurt by an adverse stimulus which it cannot escape. Eventually the animal will stop trying to avoid the pain and behave as if it is utterly helpless to change the situation. Finally, when opportunities to escape are presented, this learned helplessness prevents any action. The only coping mechanism the animal uses is to be stoical and put up with the discomfort, not expending energy getting worked up about the adverse stimulus... Later research discovered that the original theory of learned helplessness failed to account for people's varying reactions to situations that can cause learned helplessness. Learned helplessness sometimes remains specific to one situation, but at other times generalizes across situations. An individual's attributional style or explanatory style was the key to understanding why people responded differently to adverse events. Although a group of people may experience the same or similar negative events, how each person privately interprets or explains the event will affect the likelihood of acquiring learned helplessness and subsequent depression. People with pessimistic explanatory style — which sees negative events as permanent (‘it will never change’), personal (‘it's my fault’), and pervasive (‘I can't do anything correctly’) — are most likely to suffer from learned helplessness and depression. Cognitive behavioral therapy, heavily endorsed by [Martin] Seligman, can often help people to learn more realistic explanatory styles, and can help ease depression. Bernard Weiner's attribution theory (1979, 1985, 1986) concerns the way that people attribute a cause or explanation to an unpleasant event. Attribution theory includes the dimensions of globality/specificity, stability/instability, and internality/externality. A global attribution occurs when the individual believes that the cause of negative events is consistent across different contexts. A specific attribution occurs when the individual believes that the cause of a negative event is unique to a particular situation. A stable attribution occurs when the individual believes the cause to be consistent across time. Unstable attribution occurs when the individual thinks that the cause is specific to one point in time. An external attribution assigns causality to situational or external factors, while an internal attribution assigns causality to factors within the person… There are several aspects of human helplessness that have no counterpart among other animals. One of the most intriguing aspects is ‘vicarious learning (or modelling)’: that people can learn to be helpless through observing another person encountering uncontrollable events. Apart from the shared depression symptoms between human and other animals such as passivity, introjected hostility, weight loss, appetite loss, social and sexual deficits, some of the diagnostic symptoms of learned helplessness — including depressed mood, feelings of worthlessness, and suicidal ideation — can be found and observed in human beings but not necessarily in animals. In animal models, control over stress conveys resilience to future uncontrolled stressors and induces changes in the function of specific neurons within the prefrontal cortex." - wikipedia.org[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness ]Author's Info on Wikipedia - Author on ebay - Author on Amazon - More Quotes by this AuthorStart Searching Amazon for GiftsSend as Free eCard with optional Google Image

[Quote No.42232] Need Area: Mind > General "It is certainly true that whatever a man may do or say, the most significant thing about him is what he thinks; and significant also is how he came to think it, why he continued to think it, or, if he did not continue, what the influences were which caused him to change his mind." - Albert Jay Nock(1873 – 1945), influential American author, a philosophical father of the modern, libertarian Conservative movement later carried by Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Ron Paul, educational theorist, and social critic of the early and middle 20th century. Quote from his book, 'Memoirs of a Superfluous Man', 1943.Author's Info on Wikipedia - Author on ebay - Author on Amazon - More Quotes by this AuthorStart Searching Amazon for GiftsSend as Free eCard with optional Google Image

[Quote No.42765] Need Area: Mind > General "Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content [attitudes, skills, knowledge] is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act, he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch - or build a cyclotron - without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it [a dream-goal and a plan]. To remain alive [grow and evolve as an individual along with society], he must think [and choose and so skill using his mind is critical to the quality and quantity of his life as well as that of those he loves and society as a whole]." - Ayn RandAmerican philosopher and author. Quote from her best-selling, philosophical novel, 'Atlas Shrugged'. It is part of the famous speech by the character John Galt.Author's Info on Wikipedia - Author on ebay - Author on Amazon - More Quotes by this AuthorStart Searching Amazon for GiftsSend as Free eCard with optional Google Image

[Quote No.42928] Need Area: Mind > General "We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us — the labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path... [the eternal process of LIFE - becoming our better selves as we struggle to realise a better world.]" - Joseph Campbell(1904 – 1987), American professor, writer, and orator best known for his work in the fields of comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work is vast, covering many aspects of the human experience. Campbell's seminal work, ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’ (1949), discusses what Campbell called the monomyth — the cycle of the journey of the hero — a term that he borrowed directly from Joyce's ‘Finnegans Wake’. His work, ‘The Masks of God’, written between 1962 and 1968, in four-volumes covers mythology from around the world, from ancient to modern. Where ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’ focused on the commonality of mythology (the ‘elementary ideas’), ‘The Masks of God’ books focus upon historical and cultural variations the monomyth takes on (the ‘folk ideas’). In other words, where ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’ draws perhaps more from psychology, ‘The Masks of God’ books draw more from anthropology and history. The four volumes of ‘The Masks of God’ are as follows: ‘Primitive Mythology’, ‘Oriental Mythology’, ‘Occidental Mythology’, and ‘Creative Mythology’. At the time of his death, Campbell was in the midst of working upon a large-format, lavishly illustrated series entitled ‘Historical Atlas of World Mythology’. This series was to build on Campbell’s idea, first presented in ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’, that myth evolves over time through four stages: -1- ‘The Way of the Animal Powers’—the myths of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers which focus on shamanism and animal totems; -2- ‘The Way of the Seeded Earth’—the myths of Neolithic, agrarian cultures which focus upon a mother goddess and associated fertility rites; -3- ‘The Way of the Celestial Lights’—the myths of Bronze Age city-states with pantheons of gods ruling from the heavens, led by a masculine god-king, and; -4- ‘The Way of Man’—religion and philosophy as it developed after the Axial Age (c. 6th century BC), in which the mythic imagery of previous eras was made consciously metaphorical, reinterpreted as referring to psycho-spiritual, not literal-historical, matters. This transition is evident in the East in Buddhism, Vedanta, and philosophical Taoism; and in the West in the Mystery Cults, Platonism, Christianity and Gnosticism. Other well-known works of his are ‘Myths to Live By’ (1972), ‘Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation’ (2004) and ‘A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living’ (1991). Quote from ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’ (1949), Chapter 1.Author's Info on Wikipedia - Author on ebay - Author on Amazon - More Quotes by this AuthorStart Searching Amazon for GiftsSend as Free eCard with optional Google Image

[Quote No.43231] Need Area: Mind > General "Life itself is always in beta, always about speculation [experiment] and risk, always grappling with the unknown future, always about finding the new way to accomplish wonderful things." - Jeffrey Tuckerexecutive editor of Laissez Faire Books and the founder of the Laissez Faire Club, an online digital society of liberty. He is the author of three books, including, and most famously, 'Bourbon for Breakfast'. He has also written thousands of articles that explore the intersection of economics, literature and popular culture. He served as editor of mises.org for the life of the site until 2011, writes a weekly column for chantcafe.com and is senior fellow at the Acton Institute and an adjunct scholar of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Published in 'Laissez Faire Today', July 2, 2012. [http://lfb.org/today/lifeisbeta/ ]Author's Info on Wikipedia - Author on ebay - Author on Amazon - More Quotes by this AuthorStart Searching Amazon for GiftsSend as Free eCard with optional Google Image

[Quote No.43379] Need Area: Mind > General "[Extreme individualism and the need for expansive individual freedom are often hallmarks of both the genius and the unwell. Tolerance and individual freedom should be shown to all but especially these most unusual people, for their good and happiness as well as our own. Remember... ] Good sense travels on the well-worn paths; genius, never. And that is why the crowd, not altogether without reason, is so ready to treat great men [and women, who often eventually dramatically improve the world beyond the ability of anyone else could] as lunatics [at least at first, until their genius and contribution is recognised, but sadly often still even after, instead of celebrating these extraordinarily unique blessings to us all in the wide spectrum of humanity]. " - Cesare Lombroso(1835 - 1909)Author's Info on Wikipedia - Author on ebay - Author on Amazon - More Quotes by this AuthorStart Searching Amazon for GiftsSend as Free eCard with optional Google Image

[Quote No.44593] Need Area: Mind > General "[A key life-skill:] My 5-Step Process to Getting What You Want Out of Life: There are five things that you have to do to get what you want out of life. First, you have to choose your goals, which will determine your direction. Then you have to design a plan to achieve your goals. On the way to your goals, you will encounter problems. As I mentioned, these problems typically cause pain. The most common source of pain is in exploring your mistakes and weaknesses. You will either react badly to the pain or react like a master problem solver. That is your choice. To figure out how to get around these problems you must be calm and analytical to accurately diagnose your problems. Only after you have an accurate diagnosis of them can you design a plan that will get you around your problems. Then you have to do the tasks specified in the plan. Through this process of encountering problems and figuring out how to get around them, you will become progressively more capable and achieve your goals more easily. Then you will set bigger, more challenging goals, in the same way that someone who works with weights naturally increases the poundage. This is the process of personal evolution, which I call my 5-Step Process.
In other words, 'The Process' consists of five distinct steps:
-1- Have clear goals.
-2- Identify and don’t tolerate the problems that stand in the way of achieving your goals.
-3- Accurately diagnose these problems.
-4- Design plans that explicitly lay out tasks that will get you around your problems and on to your goals.
-5- Implement these plans — i.e., do these tasks....
In a nutshell, my 5-Step process for achieving what you want is: [Knowledge plus] Values → 1) Goals → 2) Problems → 3) Diagnoses → 4) Designs → 5) Tasks. Your [knowledge and] values determine what you want, i.e., your goals. In trying to achieve your goals, you will encounter problems that have to be diagnosed. Only after determining the real root causes of these problems can you design a plan to get around them. Once you have a good plan, you have to muster the self-discipline to do what is required to make the plan succeed. Note that this process starts with your [knowledge and] values, but it requires that you succeed at all five steps. While these steps require different abilities, you don’t have to be good at all of them. If you aren’t good at all of them (which is true for almost everyone), you need to know what you are bad at and how to compensate for your weaknesses. This requires you to put your ego aside, objectively reflect on your strengths and weaknesses, and seek the help from others." - Ray Dalio(1949 - ), American businessman and founder of the world's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates. He takes a very macro view when investing. According to 'Forbes', as of March 2012, he is the 44th richest person in America and the 88th richest person in the world with a net worth of $10 billion. Dalio has been labeled as the Steve Jobs of investing. In 2012, Dalio was named in 'Time 100', an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world assembled by 'Time'. Bridgewater manages approximately $130 billion in global investments for a wide array of institutional clients, including foreign governments and central banks, corporate and public pension funds, university endowments and charitable foundations. Approximately 1,200 people work at Bridgewater, which is based in Westport, Connecticut. Founded in 1975 out of a two-bedroom apartment, Bridgewater remains an independent, employee-run organization. Throughout its 37-year history, Bridgewater has been recognized as a top-performing manager and an industry innovator, winning 24 industry awards in the past five years alone. In both 2010 and 2011, Bridgewater ranked as the largest and best-performing hedge fund manager in the world. Its clients and employees routinely give Bridgewater top satisfaction ratings in annual surveys. Bridgewater’s unique results are a product of its unique culture. Truth and excellence are valued above all else. In order to be excellent we need to know what’s true, especially those things that we would rather not be true, so that we can decide how best to deal with them. We want logic and reason to be the basis for making decisions. It is through this striving to be excellent by being radically truthful and transparent that we build meaningful work and meaningful relationships. 'If you want to work in an environment that values truth and openness in the pursuit of innovation, excellence and quality relationships.... If you want to discover your strengths and weaknesses and work hard to get better fast... If you have the need to understand what makes sense rather than to follow instructions... If you can put aside ego barriers to learning... If you demand others to be truthful and open with you and you are willing to be truthful and open with them... If you want meaningful work and meaningful relationships... ...come to Bridgewater.' This quote comes from his book, 'Principles'. [http://www.bwater.com/home/our-company/company.aspx and http://www.bwater.com/Uploads/FileManager/Principles/Bridgewater-Associates-Ray-Dalio-Principles.pdf ]Author's Info on Wikipedia - Author on ebay - Author on Amazon - More Quotes by this AuthorStart Searching Amazon for GiftsSend as Free eCard with optional Google Image